No electricity?  How a simple tagline helped a a local company outpoint the big-boy advertisers during the Super Bowl?

Sometimes with a great commercial, sometimes with great timing, and sometimes with both.

Just ask our Marketing Director, Julia Campbell.

Under her direction and coordination, we developed a series of 4-second commercials to air during the “big game.”

Why just four seconds?  Because the Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the U.S., and since advertising costs reflect the size of the viewing audience, the per-spot air time is very expensive, even for local advertisers.  Just to give you a little perspective, national advertisers paid $4 million dollars in air time for each thirty-second commercial – some even more – during the 2013 Super Bowl.

We decided to play the ad game anyway, and Julia helped us figure out just how to do that.  Instead of developing, for example, one fifteen- or thirty-second commercial to air only one time, we developed four shorter commercials.  We ran each of them once, one in each quarter.

That’s a great strategy all by itself.  And so was getting some added name brand awareness, a look at our various services, and our phone number all out there in just four seconds.

Now for the “good timing” part of the story.  If you watched the game, you know that there was a thirty-five minute game delay caused by a power failure at the New Orleans Superdome.  When that occurred, we were all sitting at the edge of our seats, more concerned about whether anyone would stay awake long enough to see our final two commercials than the outcome of the game.

And while thirty-five minutes was plenty long, the vast majority of people watching the game on TV hung in there.  Then, Lady Luck really did us a favor as our four-second commercial on Burton’s electrical services aired right after the power came back on.  No electricity?  Call Burton.  Perfect advertising timing, even if we didn’t plan it.

If nothing else, we have a great and humorous story to tell going forward.  And lots of thanks owed to Julia Campbell for helping to put us in the right place at the right time.

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